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Scots Who Made A Difference

S
SMOLLETT, TOBIAS (1721-71)
An outstanding figure in the development of the modern novel, Tobias Smollett came from Cardross, Dumbartonshire. His vigorous prose and brilliant portrayals of comic characters provide a panorama of the life of his times. Considered a "lousy Scot" and lacking entry into high society, he vividly described the horrors and comic episodes exposed by the protagonist of his picaresque novel "The Adventures of Roderick Randol". This was followed by The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle in 1751.

A born story teller, Smollett's uncanny observations of the follies of an adventurous life came from his own experience in the British navy, where he served as second mate to a ship's surgeon in the early 1740's. On a naval visit to Jamaica, he had the good fortune to win the hand of a woman of wealth and brought her back to London. Much of these experiences found their way into Roderick Random.

Following a short prison stretch for libel, Smollett brought forth his Adventures of Sir Lancelot Greaves in 1762. After the devastating death of his young daughter in 1763, the Smolletts lived for a while in France, but he returned to England to write his famous epistolary novel and masterpiece, The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker (1771), a depiction of English town life. In many of his novels, Smollett substituted racial characterizations for social class, a trick that made his work very popular at a time when the Scots and Welsh, with their strange customs and even stranger languages, were coming to London in increasing numbers.

Those American mothers who feed their children the abominable white bread found in most supermarkets should read what Smollett had to say about it in Humphrey Clinker; "the bread [eaten in London] is a deleterious paste, mixed up with chalk, alum and bone-ashes, insipid to the taste and destructive to the constitution. The good people are not ignorant of this adulteration; but they prefer it to wholesome bread, because it is whiter than the meal of corn; thus they sacrifice their taste and their health and the lives of their tender infants, to a most absurd gratification of a mis-judging eye.


SOUTER, WILLIAM (1898-1943)
Second only to Hugh MacDiarmid in the Scottish Renaissance movement of the early part of this century, William Souter came from Perth. A semi-invalid for most of his adult life, following service in the Royal Navy in WW I when he contacted a debilitating bone disease, he was bedridden for the last 13 years of his life. Yet he continued to exhibit an exuberant love of the variety of nature, of mankind and the craft of literature.

Writing in Scots in his Seeds in the Wind, Souter chose beast fables in his "bairn-rhymes" (child rhymes) to express a mature insight into the life of things through the innocent vision of childhood. He also developed his ballad style in his Poems in Scots (1935). His humorous poems, which he named "whigmaleeries," full of comic exaggeration, combine elements of fancy and reality, artfully combining the familiar with the imaginary. Souter also wrote Riddles in Scots (1937) as well as his English-language poems Brief Words (1935) and The Expectant Silence (1944).


SPARK, MURIEL (b. 1918)
In 1961, Muriel Spark, novelist, critic, poet and playwright published her famous The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. However, she gained even more fame when it was made into a highly successful play and then a Hollywood film that won an Oscar for its leading actress Maggie Smith (for many filmgoers, Smith IS Brodie). Born in Edinburgh, Spark (formerly Camberg) spent a number of years in Central Africa before returning to Britain during the Second World War to work in the political intelligence department of the Foreign Office.

For two years, (1947-49) Spark served as general secretary to the Poetry Society and also editor of The Poetry Review. She next published a series of critical biographies of literary figures and editions of 19th century letters, including those of Mary Shelley, John Masefield and the Brontes. Her other works include such novels as The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960), The Mandelbaum Gate (1965), Memento Mori (1959), The Bachelors (1960) and collected poems such as Collected Poems I (1967) and Collected Stories I (1967).


SPENCE, SIR BASIL (1907-76)
When Coventry Cathedral, England, lay in ashes after the Nazi air force had blitzed the town one terrible night during World War II, a competition to design the new cathedral was won by Basil Spence, born in Bombay of Scottish parents and educated in Edinburgh. Spence's plan was to incorporate some of the ruins of the old cathedral within the new and his masterpiece brought him worldwide fame as an architect.

Before the War, Spence had achieved considerable success with his buildings in Edinburgh and in Peeblesshire. He designed a pavilion at the 1951 Festival of Britain Exhibition in London. Two of his notable achievements, following Coventry Cathedral, are Sussex University and the British Embassy in Rome, Italy which has been regarded as a worthy companion to Michaelangelo's Porta Pia.


STENHOUSE, WILLIAM (1773-1827)
Indispensable to present-day research on Scottish folk tunes is the work of William Stenhouse, of Roxburghshire, antiquarian and writer on Scottish folk song. His one work was the Illustrations of the Lyric Poetry and Music of Scotland, which he designed as a series of notes to each of the 600 songs in The Scots Musical Museum, edited by Robert Burns, Edinburgh, 1787-1803. Stenhouse's work was commissioned by the famous publishing company of Blackwood, but were not published until 1839. It contains many of the songs from his childhood reminiscences as well as those of other researchers.


STEVENSON, ROBERT (1772-1850)
We have all grown up with stories of the folk of the coastal villages around the rocky shores of Britain who lured ships to their destruction by swinging signal lanterns and then plundering the cargoes and often killing the crew. This was probably a common curse before the advent of reliable lighthouses. Much of the credit therefore, for making the shores of the nation safer for ships and crew must go to Robert Stevenson, from Glasgow, who not only designed and built lighthouses, but also invented the universally used intermittent flashing warning lights.

The few coal beacons on the coasts of Scotland were superseded by lighthouses after Stevenson had devised a system of projecting a beam from a lamp by means of reflectors. The first light that used this system was that at Kinnarid Head in 1787. A member of the newly established Commissioners for Northern Lights, Stevenson travelled around the coasts of Scotland setting up a system of lights where possible. (Aboard the little ship was Sir Walter Scott who got inspiration for The Pirate.)

In 1807, Stevenson became the Commission's chief engineer. This was the same year he began work on the Bell Rock Lighthouse, the very first of his own design and completed on its isolated rock in 1811 (the Eddystone Light off the Cornish coast in southwest England had been built by John Smeaton in 1755). All in all, during Stevenson's service with the Commission, 23 lights were erected, many of them becoming of crucial importance in Scotland's maritime (and wartime) history. His work led to many improvements in the design and construction of lighthouses; it was continued by his three sons, Alan, David and Thomas (the father of Robert Louis Stevenson). Robert also invented the hydrophore, an instrument for obtaining specimens from water.


STEVENSON, ROBERT LOUIS (1850-94)
Though he found fame as an essayist, literary critic, poet and travel book writer, Robert is best remembered for his romantic adventure stories. Ill-health plagued him all his life, early on it caused him to leave damp Scotland for a warmer, sunnier France, where he began his popular travel stories and began to build his reputation as a literary essayist. He published An Inland Voyage (1878) about a canal trip and Travels with Donkey in the Cevennes (1879). His trip to the United States, where he met his wife, gave rise to The Silverado Squatters, about tough mining camps.

Fame and fortune arrived in massive doses after Stevenson finished Treasure Island (1883), the well-known, well-loved tale of the search for the pirate loot of Captain Kidd and the thrilling adventures of Jim Hawkins and the rival parties involved when they disembark from the good ship Hispaniola.

Stevenson then brought out the entirely different A Child's Garden of Verses, l (1885) followed by a second volume of poetry, Underwoods (1887) designed for a more mature audience. Then came another highly successful adventure novel, Kidnapped, its less successful sequel Catriona and perhaps his most famous story of all, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (that moral tale of divided personality, filmed on so many occasions by so many well-known actors).

As if all this were not enough, still-plagued by ill health, Stevenson finished a collection of short stories, The Merry Men in 1887 that included the powerful duo Markheim and Thrawn Janet. He then finished another highly successful romance, The Master of Ballantrae (also made into a Hollywood movie with Errol Flynn in the lead). Stevenson died in the South Seas where he wrote his memorable impressions In the South Seas (1896). Another highly acclaimed movie, the outrageously irreverent comedy The Wrong Box was based on a novel that Stevenson co-authored with his step-son Lloyd Osbourne in 1889.


STEWART, BALFOUR (1828-87)
The start of ionospheric science owes a great deal to Scots physicist Balfour Stewart who proposed that the variable part of the Earth's magnetic field could be ascribed to electric currents flowing in the upper atmosphere, later identified as the ionosphere. The fraction of the Earth's magnetic field produced by outside sources is now understood to be an important representation of the electromagnetic activities in the Earth's upper atmosphere.

As early as 1839, German scientist Carl Frederick Gauss had speculated that an electrically conducting region of the atmosphere could account for observed variations of the Earth's magnetic field. In 1882, Stewart developed this theme in his article for the ninth edition of Encyclopedia Britannica. Ionospheric science was now firmly established as a legitimate field of study.


STEWART, DUGALD (1753-1828)
An important contributor to the so-called "common sense" school of Scottish philosophy was Edinburgh-born Dugald Stewart. Stewart succeeded his father as Chair of Mathematics at Edinburgh in 1775, later becoming professor of moral philosophy. His own views were strongly influenced by the publication of Thomas Reid's An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense in 1764. Stewart's own major work is Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind (in 3 volumes, 1792-1827). He also completed Outlines of Moral Philosophy (1793), Philosophical Essays (1810) and Philosophy of the Active and Moral Powers of Man (1828).

A mathematician, Stewart took a scientific approach to philosophical problems, believing with Reid and his colleagues that philosophy should be a scientific discipline free from metaphysical speculations that would distract it. He was fond of making analogies between the axioms of mathematics and the laws that govern human thinking, ideas that have been of increasing importance since the work of Einstein in the early part of this century.


STEWART, JAMES (1843-1913)
James Stewart may not get much of a write-up in the world's encyclopedias, but he was of immense importance in the development of workers' education. An academic and fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, Stewart had the revolutionary idea of bringing academic subjects to working class people through extension course. This idea is only now coming to full fruition as more and more people seek their education in part-time courses when they can get away from family or work duties. Stewart believed that workers should not be denied an education and through his powers of persuasion, the highly privileged and "ivory-tower" University of Cambridge, England, began offering extension courses as early as 1873.


STIRLING, WILLIAM ALEXANDER, 1st Earl
Nova Scotia was the site of the first permanent European settlement in North America north of Florida. It looks a lot like parts of Scotland, and in the Canadian province one can hear Scots accents, the playing of the bagpipes and can attend a college to learn the Scottish Gaelic language. The very name Nova Scotia means New Scotland. It was founded and colonized by William Alexander Stirling, from Menstrie, Clackmannan, a poet, courtier and statesman.

While attending the court of the Scots King James VI in London, Stirling wrote his sonnet sequence Aurora. Various royal duties of the next several years included a stint as advisor to young prince Henry, a debt-collecting agent and the owner of mineral rights. After Stewart published Doomesday, or, The Great Day of the Lords Judgement (1614), the scholarly king asked him to help in the translation of the Psalms.

Anxious to bring his native land into Britain's rapidly expanding colonial affairs, Stewart obtained a grant of northwestern Newfoundland, but later in 1621 managed to become proprietor of Nova Scotia. Despite his efforts and his pamphlet An Encouragement to Colonise, there were not too many Scots willing to make the journey to the wilds of Canada, where who knows what terrors were awaiting behind every bush and rock, and by 1626, the region was still not colonized.

French challenges to Scottish rights broke out in warfare in 1627 and King Charles II got busy awarding land grants and trade monopolies to those who would settle in Nova Scotia. Many Scottish settlers took advantage of the offer. However, the province was surrendered to France in 1629 by the Treaty of Susa. Later reverting to British control, Nova Scotia became the first British colony to exercise the prerogative of government responsible to the people through their elected representatives.

Nova Scotia joined with Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick in 1867. Though one eighth of the present population are of French descent, fully seven eighths came from Britain, mostly Scotland. Clan gatherings are held annually and the Gaelic Mod, a festival of Highland music, arts and crafts is also a much-welcomed annual celebration of the island's Scottish heritage.


STIRLING, JAMES (1692-1770)
Also known as "Stirling the Venetian" Edinburgh-born James Stirling was a mathematician who did much to advance the theory of infinite series and infinitesimal calculus. Stirling had gone to Venice to study after being expelled from Oxford University for his support of the Jacobite cause. In his new home, he discovered the secret of the Venetian glass makers, later publishing A Description of a Machine to Blow Fire by Fall of Water (1745).

Back in London, Stirling was famous enough to be elected to the Royal Society in 1726. He published a supplement to the great Isaac Newton's enumeration of 72 forms of the cubic curve, Newton's Third Order Curves (in 8 volumes, 1717). His other publications are of great interest to mathematicians but unknown to the general reader. A series expansion is called Stirling's formula.


STIRLING, ROBERT (1790-1878)
From Perth county, Robert Stirling invented the Stirling-cycle hot air engine. Trained as a clergyman, Robert received his first patent in 1816 and his engines were manufactured from 1818 to 1922. The Stirling cycle hot air engine is remarkable in many ways. It emits no exhaust fumes; it requires no air other than that initially in the combustion chamber or "heat exchanger" and is potentially useful in urban environments and in airless outer space. The machine received a new lease on life when it was developed by the Dutch firm of Philips in collaboration with General Motors to produce Stirling engines that could develop as much as 5,000 horsepower.


STOPES, MARIE CHARLOTTE CARMICHAEL (1880-1958)
From about 1930 on, the tireless work of Marie Stopes helped the Church of England (the Episcopal Church) relax its stand against birth control, though her fervent pleas fell on deaf Catholic and High Church ears. In 1921, the Edinburgh-born Stopes had founded the first instructional clinic for contraception in Great Britain. A highly regarded botanist, Stopes had turned to the problems of marriage and birth control when her own marriage failed in 1916. Her concern, initially was less with over-population and poverty than with birth control's use as an aid to marriage fulfillment and to save women from the physical toils of excessive child-bearing.

After her marriage to wealthy aircraft builder Humphrey Verdon Roe, Stopes could afford to begin her crusade in earnest. In 1921 her pioneering birth-control clinic was set up in the poor district of Holloway, London. After the Second World War, she lectured on and promoted birth control in some countries in the Far East. Her influential books are Married Love (1918), Wise Parenthood (1918) and Contraception: Its Theory, History and Practice (1923, and reissued 1931).


STRACHAN, JOHN (1778-1867)
From Aberdeen, John Strachan emigrated to Canada in 1799, becoming the first Anglican bishop of Toronto. Following service as a teacher in Kingston and church posts at Cornwall and York (now Toronto), he entered politics. He was first appointed to the executive Council of Upper Canada (Ontario) and then to the Legislative Council. In 1825, he was appointed archdeacon of York and played a leading part in the establishment of the University of Toronto in 1827.

Always seeking to maintain a privileged position for the Church of England (Anglican) in Canada, Strachan became the first bishop of the newly created diocese of Toronto. Under his dynamic leadership, the number of churches doubled in that province. He also established a system of church schools. In 1843, he became the President of Kings College and in 1851 established the University of Trinity College. Stachans' work led to the organization of the Church in Canada as a self-governing denomination within the Anglican community.


STRATHCONA, DONALD ALEXANDER, 1st Baron
From Forres, Moray, Smith rose to become one of Canada's leading fur traders, financiers, railroad promoters and statesman. After serving as the resident governor at Montreal, in l870 he joined the new Manitoba legislature as MP for Winnipeg. He financed the building of the railroad as far as Manitoba after the Pacific Scandal of 1873 had bankrupted the Rail Company. Because of his financial support, Smith was given the honor of driving the last spike for the Canadian Pacific Railway at Craigellachie, British Columbia in 1885. In 1896, he went to London as high commissioner for Canada and gained the title of Baron of Strathcona and Mount Royal.
  

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